Connnie L. Celum, M.D., M.P.H., is professor of global health and medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, and adjunct professor of epidemiology, University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine. For the Microbicide Trials Network (MTN), Dr. Celum is co-principal investigator.
A renowned infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist, Dr. Celum's clinical and research interests focus on strategies to reduce HIV acquisition and transmission. Her approach involves first identifying potential intervention approaches using data on behavioral and biologic risk factors for acquiring or transmitting HIV and then conducting randomized clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy of these interventions with biologic outcome measurements. Dr. Celum's research has looked at the behavioral and biologic risk factors for HIV acquisition among men who have sex with men (MSM); sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), particularly genital herpes, as co-factors for HIV infection; HIV vaccine trials; clinical trials of microbicides; and early HIV infection. She recently completed a large Phase III randomized trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of daily antivirals for suppressing herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) among HIV-negative, HSV-2 seropositive women at two African sites, and among men who have sex with men (MSM) at sites in Peru and the United States. It is the first trial to test whether suppressing HSV-2 can help prevent HIV infection in this high-risk population. A second major trial evaluating the effect of HSV-2 suppression on HIV transmission and HIV disease progression among HIV discordant couples in Africa is still underway and also being led by Dr. Celum, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In others studies, Dr. Celum's efforts focus on discordant couples in whom one partner has HIV and the other is not infected. She is principal investigator of a Gates-funded Phase III prevention trial investigating the use of oral antiretroviral drugs by HIV-uninfected partners for preventing HIV transmission among 3,900 discordant couples in Africa.
Dr. Celum is an attending physician and former medical director at the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinic, Harborview Medical Center. For the past ten years, she has been principal investigator of the NIAID-funded Seattle HIV Prevention Trials Unit.
Since 2001, Dr. Celum has served on the HIV Prevention Science Working Group, Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health. She is a member of the Data and Safety Monitoring Board for two NIAID-funded clinical trials and has served as consultant for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on STD treatment guidelines; the World Health Organization on standard of treatment for HIV prevention research trial participants who acquire HIV; and as special consultant to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on HIV vaccines. A major contributor in the field of HIV prevention, she has published nearly 100 original peer-reviewed research publications and numerous book chapter and monographs.
Dr. Celum completed her medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She was a resident in internal medicine and continued post-graduate training in epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and subsequently a senior fellow in infectious diseases. While in the Clinical Scholars Program, Dr. Celum earned a master's in public health from the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine.